One of the items that you will find in our printer’s drawer is a playing card. The back of the card is printed with “Wheeler and Steele”. The Steele family lived across the street and a couple of doors up the hill from us when my family lived on Vine Street in Alamo. My earliest memories are of the houses we lived in on Vine Street and my parents playing cards with the Steeles on Friday and Saturday nights. Their daughter Nan and I are the same age. We would spend time together playing while our parents played cards. Their game of choice was canasta. I never understood how to play the game and I understand that they didn’t play by the official canasta rules. But they wore out many decks of cards over the years. At one point, they ordered a deck of cards with their names on the back. This deck became the official deck. They played with it long after the cards were worn out.
Shorty and Betty Jo were like second parents to me. They had two kids older that Nan, Jane and Joe, and all of them were like family. In addition to card nights, we also traveled with them to high school football games, the Mid-South Fair in Memphis, fishing trips and various other little day trips. My mom and Betty Jo died within a week of each other. When they were buried, one of the playing cards from their deck was placed in the casket with them, just like they did with Shorty died several years before.